Astronomy Blog http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/ An astronomy blog usually (but not always) based in the UK. Pondering questions such as What is in an exoplanet name ?. en-gb Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:47:00 +0000 Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:47:00 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Marzipan (v0.6.2) Playing with the Moon http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000997.shtml
I wanted to do a quick post about something I was reminded about on Twitter earlier. Moon Games is a series of photographs by Laurent Laveder which use perspective to play with the Moon when it is near the horizon. Each photograph appears to show a foreground person interacting with the Moon as if it were next to them. I first saw Laurent's images when they used a hula-hoop to illustrate an eclipse for APoD back in 2006. There are some really nice compositions and I particularly like the one with a figure trying to lasso the Moon and this one where someone appears to be painting it. If you haven't seen them before, they are well worth a look. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:47:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000997.shtml Particle Battleships http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000996.shtml CERN. Have they found a hint of a Higgs particle, have they found a hint of no Higgs particle? It is difficult to tell on a very broken-up webcast but, from what I can gather, there may be a hint of something with an energy of 126 GeV (with a level of confidence that doesn't let them claim a discovery yet).

Earlier, John Humphreys on the Today programme seemed to suggest that if nothing was found today the whole exercise (ATLAS/CMS) had been a waste of time. This view (he may have been playing devil's advocate) misunderstands how science works. The process of science is one of exploration. Things aren't always as you expected. Regardless of if you get the expected answer, the result tells you something about the universe that you didn't know (or were very unsure of) before. That's science.

Hunting for the Higgs particle is a bit like the game Battleships. You start off with a huge area of unexplored sea (or energy ranges) and you gradually place pegs in the board trying to locate the opponent's battleships (the Higgs particle). Your initial pegs are pretty unlikely to find your opponent's ships but you have to start searching somewhere. Searches that find nothing are still telling you something. As time goes on you start to really limit the places where the battleships can be. Gradually you start to spot battleship shaped holes in your search - some will be empty but some should contain what you're looking for*.

* Of course, your opponent might have cheated and not put down any battleships at all. As you rule out more and more sea you'll spot that too. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Tue, 13 Dec 2011 14:02:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000996.shtml Astronomy Pantomime http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000995.shtml pantomime. Although the origins may extend to the ancient Greeks, modern pantomime originates in the Victorian era and is a comedic performance of a children's story usually performed in December or early January. They are mostly aimed at children but with some jokes for their parents too. A curious part of pantomime is that the lead male character is usually played by a young woman and there is always an elderly mother-figure (called the Dame) who is always played by a man.

Back in 2006, the Jodcast (the UK's first regular astronomy podcast) decided to share this tradition by book-ending the normal podcast with first and second acts of a pantomime. The Jodcast presenters put on their acting hats and produced a story loosely based on The Wizard of Oz but with a Jodcast slant. The next year we felt we should do another and so we presented our take on A Christmas Carol with the ghosts of Astronomy Past, Astronomy Now Present and Astronomy Future. Future years have seen Nick and the Intro Factory, Jenaddin (performed in front of a studio audience for Jodcast Live), Neil White and the Seven Dwarf Planets (with a cameo by dwarf planet finder Mike Brown), and this year's Jendarella.

I've extracted the pantomimes for posterity and included them below:
  • 2006: The Wizard of Oz (2.3MB) starring Ian Morison as the Narrator, Nick Rattenbury as the Great and Powerful Pod, Megan Argo as Dorothy, Tim O'Brien as Tim Man, Stuart Lowe as Stuart-crow, David Ault as Cowardly Dave, Mark Bruzee as HAL and Seth Adam Sher as Dave;
  • 2007: A Christmas Carol (2 MB) starring Ian Morison as the Narrator, David Ault as The Ghost of Astronomy Past, Nick Rattenbury as Bob Rattenbury, Stuart Lowe as Stuart Scrooge, Tim O'Brien as The Ghost of Jodcast Present and Mark Bruzee as HAL;
  • 2008: Nick and the Intro Factory (2.9MB) starring Tom Muxlow as the Narrator, Nick Rattenbury as Nicky Bucket, Tim O'Brien as Grandpa Tim, David Ault as Dave Wonka, Stuart Lowe as Stuart PC, Megan Argoas Megan Newshound, Roy Smits as Roy, Mark Bruzee as HAL, and Fiona Waller as Mand;S lift and; Servelan.
  • 2009: Jenaddin (4.6MB) starring Chris Lintott as the Narrator, David Ault as Doctor Twankey, Jen Gupta as Jenaddin, Stuart Lowe as Prof Abanaza, Megan Argoas Princess Parkes, Neil Young as the Emperor, Lisa Hartley as the Empress, Paul Miyagawa as theGuard, Nick Rattenbury as the Genie;
  • 2010: Neil White and the Seven Dwarf Planets (2.1MB) starring Adam Avison as the Narrator, Neil Young as Prince Neil, Megan Argo as Eris, Jen Gupta as Ceres, Catherine McGuire as Haumea, Mark Purver as the Mirror, David Aultas the King and MakeMake, Ian Morison as 15727 IanMorison, and Mike Brown as himself;
  • 2011: Jendarella (3MB) starring Libby Jones as the Narrator, Jen Gupta as Jenderella, Stuart Lowe as Baron Cardiff, Melanie Gendre as Stepmother, Adam Avison and Mark Purver as the Ugly Sisters, Megan Argoas Fairy Jodmother, David Ault as Prince Professional Respect, Leo Huckvale and Christina Smith as extras.

You can hear the latest pantomime on the December 2011 edition of the Jodcast. Credit goes to all the people who've been on the Jodcast over the years and particularly David Ault who wrote the scripts. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Sat, 03 Dec 2011 13:04:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000995.shtml Spot the mistake http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000994.shtml NASA Watch and claims to be a social networking site for space. In reality it seems to be more of a blog than a social network like Facebook or Twitter. Anyway, the page I stumbled upon was a page from 2009 about the cooling systems on Planck. It has a fairly glaring mistake on it. Can you spot it? - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:14:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000994.shtml 2005 YU55 animation http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000993.shtml LCOGT telescope in California to make an animation of the 400 metre diameter asteroid over the hours as it went by. The fly-by is compressed into less than 30 seconds for this animation.

The asteroid has also been observed by ESA's Herschel Space Observatory even though it was moving pretty fast through the field of view. They haven't released the data yet but I'm sure they will in due course. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:51:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000993.shtml The e-MERLIN road trip http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000992.shtml the Jodcast had the idea to do a road trip of e-MERLIN. e-MERLIN is a network of radio telescopes spread around England and the Welsh borders with the headquarters at Jodrell Bank in Cheshire. The array is 217 km in diameter which would mean hundreds of miles of driving and there was a suggestion to do the whole array in one day. A few of us Jodcasters were up for the challenge and we took along some students from the University of Salford to be the camera crew. In the end we had two cars full of people.
e-MERLIN
The e-MERLIN network CREDIT: Stuart (yes, really)

The day arrived and we convened in central Manchester outside the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics bright and early. Well, early if not bright. Here is the result:


Being split between two cars we took along some walkie-talkies so we could stay in touch (yes we had phones but walkie-talkies are more fun) and gave the two cars the call-signs "pulsar" and "quasar". At one point, leaving Defford, we overheard two kids who happened to be on the same channel pretending to be pilots landing a plane. If you were those kids we are sorry that we freaked you out by pretending to be air-traffic control. It was very funny though.

The road trip was a lot of fun but also exhausting - more so for Jen who was driving and presenting. Having used the telescopes it was great to visit them all and it helped me appreciate the size a bit more. Plus, we got to do the science documentary clich; of "going on a journey". - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:37:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000992.shtml /observations version 2 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000991.shtml I wrote about the /observations project I worked on at LCOGT. The aim was to provide a web page for every public observation taken using the LCOGT network of telescopes and also provide ways to browse the images. It worked well but I knew there were improvements to be made. This week we've released version 2.

The first improvement is to allow you to browse by type of astronomical object. That is really easy as an idea but isn't so straight-forward to make work. Every observation needs to be classified. With 2 telescopes that would already be a big task for a person to do but would become a full-time job as the network expands next year. So, it had to be something that could be done automatically. Thankfully, one of my other projects - LookUP - came in useful.

When a page is created for an observation, LookUP tries to work out what the object is by querying a range of astronomical databases. If it detects an object type it stores the AVM category code for it. Once that works, it's relatively easy to make the categories browseable. The result is that you can get observations of globular clusters, emission nebulae, galaxies etc.

There are some objects that get misclassified or don't get identified and that is mostly down to the names assigned to them by the observers. Unfortunately, I can't insist that the observers use recognizable names. Nevertheless, my auto-categorization seems to work fairly well.

The second improvement was to the advanced search form. As well as being able to search by title, telescope, wavelength filter, and date, it is now possible to search by object type, by observer and by position. The position search took a bit of effort as I had to find an efficient cone search algorithm so that comparing against 60,000+ observations didn't make the results slow. Aside from some issues around the input formats (declination has to be in decimal degrees at the moment), this seems to work.
Heat map
Heat map of recent observations with the Faulkes Telescope North and Faulkes Telescope South CREDIT: Stuart/LCOGT
As a fun extra I created a heat map that shows roughly where all the telescopes have been observing during the past month. Reassuringly, it shows that nobody has observed too near to the Sun*.

I have some ideas for more improvements but they'll have to wait a while.

* Which they shouldn't be able to do anyway as the control interface shouldn't allow it - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:07:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000991.shtml Asteroid 2005 YU55 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000990.shtml won't hit the Earth and it won't hit the Moon.

Although 2005 YU55 passes within the orbital distance of the Moon, it doesn't actually get between the Earth and Moon at any point. It goes past them both. Also, space has a third dimension and 2005 YU55 actually goes quite a bit above the Earth and Moon plane when you look at it from the side. I still don't understand why some people are insisting it could hit the Earth or the Moon. It couldn't. It isn't in the right place or heading in the right direction.

Most asteroids are too far away to be able to measure their sizes directly or see detail on their surfaces from Earth. 2005 YU55 is now close enough for some Earth-based telescopes to get a good look. The Goldstone radio telescope has already produced radar images of it and plenty of others will be ogling as it goes by. In a couple of days ESA's Herschel Space Observatory (~1.5 million km away from Earth in the opposite direction than the Sun) will also have a look. Herschel has to wait that long because until then Herschel would have to look in the direction of the Earth and Sun to see it and that wouldn't do its instruments much good at all.

Can you observe it?

The asteroid is moving pretty quickly and its apparent position varies depending on where you are on Earth due to parallax. As 2005 YU55 is only about 400m across, it'll be roughly 11th magnitude. That means it'll be about 100 times fainter than the limit of the unaided eye. Nevertheless, I think I'll look up and wave goodbye as it carries on its merry way. - taken from Astronomy Blog (www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/)]]> Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:51:00 +0000 http://www.strudel.org.uk/blog/astro/000990.shtml